A lot of people are blogging about one of my favorite subjects: Savage Worlds. This role-playing game has captured my heart since I discovered it some three or four years ago. Since then, a whole slew of supplements and settings have been released, and old settings have been converted by intrepid fans. In short, there was a whole lot of material for the game.
Fast, Fun, Furious--Savage Worlds' tagline neatly sums up everything I love about it.
The system plays FAST: enemies are either standing, down, or out of the fight, which makes the GM's job of running combat encounters much easier.
The rules are FUN and hit the right medium for me--not so rules-light you feel like playing free-form, but not so rules-heavy it constricts your breathing. When I discovered Savage Worlds (in several discussions on the rpg.net forums), I was burned out from running D&D 3.5E. That game's thousand-and-one feats, prestige classes, and rules made DMing feel a lot like work--boring, drudging, and tiring work. I was about to give up on role-playing. Until I decided to check out this Savage Worlds that everyone has been talking about. It made me see the light. Here was a system with the right amount of crunchiness and yet also eased up on the GM's workload. I found out later that that feature was indeed one of SW's design goals.
Finally, a lot of factors combine to make the game FURIOUS: the amount of gaming you squeeze into one session compared to other games, the relative vulnerability and yet the larger-than-life expertise of the player characters. As an example, consider a d20 high level character: his accumulated hitpoints mean that no longer can he be killed with single hit and can probably even survive maximum velocity falls from on high, but a high rank Savage Worlds character, while demonstrating extreme competence, can still be killed instantly with a lucky blow--the imminent danger this present in almost every encounter adds a lot of suspense and thrill to the game).
Sadly, most of my Savage Worlds gaming now is done only online on RPOL.net, because my original game group (for the past 20 years) have broken up due to Real Life(tm): people graduating college, getting jobs, getting married. I've tried several times to get a new gaming group going, but none of those lasted beyond the first or second sessions. Still, I'm glad I'm getting any gaming at all.
This blog is about my thoughts on the Savage Worlds system as I both run and play it in the games I'm currently involved in. Right now, I'm running Mystaran Misadventures which is a Savaging of one of my favorite settings: the D&D Known World. I've been using the Savage Worlds Fantasy Toolkits as well as the recently released Fantasy Companion to convert Mystara with that old-school D&D flair. The initial campaign arc will use the classic D&D module compilation B1-9 In Search of Adventure. Currently, the party of adventurers are preparing to clear out the monsters of Castle Caldwell.
Stay tuned as we journey through Savage Worlds.
